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Since its inception in 2001, DysFUNctional Theater has shone a light on some of the more obscure plays about female experience. While The Vagina Monologues is anything but obscure at this point — being performed every year at thousands of venues and college campuses around the world — it’s still a natural fit for the folks at DysFUNctional. The monologues in question deal with all aspects of having, and owning, that previously un-talked-about body part, whether it be orgasm, sexual abuse, menstruation, or birth. For the 15th anniversary of V-Day, the global anti-violence event of which The Vagina Monologues is only a part, a new campaign called One Billion Rising will ask audience members to rise up and dance in support of the one billion women who will experience violence in their lifetimes.
Sun., March 10, 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., $10, The Rotunda at Penn, 4014 Walnut St., 215-573-3234, dysfunctionaltheater.com.
“Let your beauty run wild,” read Philadelphia poet laureate Sonia Sanchez from one of six haikus (followed by a much longer poem assisted by saxophone) she wrote for Wangechi Mutu’s exhibition — the first at the expanded Leonard Pearlstein Gallery at the new URBN building, home of Drexel's art and design programs.
As Dr. Joseph Gregory, chair of the departments of Art and Art History at Drexel and overseer of the gallery, told me that evening, Sanchez was instrumental in bringing Mutu — an Kenya-born artist based in Brooklyn — and her work to Philadelphia. He introduced the two almost a year ago because Sanchez was interested in writing poetry based on Mutu’s work. When he pitched the inaugural exhibition at the Pearlstein to her, “She said yes on the basis of Sonia Sanchez being involved.”
And, as Sanchez said, Mutu’s work does run wild — syncretism being a necessity of her personal history, savage beauty being her aesthetic calling, and collage her primary medium. In that regard, the gallery doesn’t save the best for last, putting the chimeric “Three Huggers” and the even more bizarre series “The Histology of the Different Tumors of the Uterus” right up front. (Glitter will never be the same.)
Also showing are a few of her short films, the most memorable of which is “Eat Cake,” a solo performance (like most of her work) in which the artist squats before a tree in a white (wedding?) dress devouring a chocolate (wedding?) cake. The image reminds one not so much of Marie Antoinette, but of Bertha Mason (née Antoinette Cosway) of Jane Eyre and The Wide Sargasso Sea — precisely the sort of maligned post-colonial female persona that would figure in Mutu’s art.
The exhibition’s centerpiece is “Suspended Playtime” (shown, above), an installation of dozens of improvised trash-bag soccer balls suspended from the ceiling by golden strings. At some point early in the evening a few youngsters decided that it was an obstacle course to be walked through, and not gingerly. The adults soon followed suit, resulting in the coterie of young women who assist Ms. Mutu staying busy throughout the event untangling strings and salvaging dropped balls.
Accompanying the exhibition was the Drexel Dance Ensemble, choreographed by Tania Isaac, whose work clearly shares Mutu’s preoccupations. The dozen or so dancers, outfitted in multicolored and feathered flesh based unitards, entered the gallery from several directions, posing and writhing in pairs until joining together for an extended finale that saw the ensemble divide, subdivide, coalesce, splinter again, recombine, and build its momentum from the slow and eerie to the frenetic. It was an attentive dedication to Mutu’s work, containing within it some of the uncanny mix of violence, provocation, and grotesque seduction that has made the 40-year-old Kenyan so major.
Through March 30.
If you like Philly film and think Kickstarter’s a kick, Philadelphia Film Society’s has your cup of tea. PFS took over the Roxy Theater building on Sansom Street (with more than one floor for screening) last year and now the local cine-festival producer has a $40,000 goal for its Kickstarter campaign: a Roxy renovation that includes everything from new seats to paint touch ups. Give until it hurts, cineastes.
Everything is coming up rosy — English rosy with the Philadelphia International Flower Show’s omnipresent Britishness — Brilliant! opened during the weekend at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Along with serving up shepherd’s pie, a fine Beef Wellington and a well’s worth of gin drinks, the Brilliant! black tie gala offered an early look at mini-fields of green topped with pig statues, sensational manicured rose gardens and several Queens — cardboard cutouts of Elizabeth the likes of which are strewn throughout Center City.
View galleryLansdale band Friends with Murder does their song "Dearly Beloved" at good, old Laurel Hill Cemetery, final resting place of people named Wister, Wistar, Furness, Rittenhouse, Pemberton and Peale — not to mention Harry Kalas and Adrian Balboa. This video makes me wonder: Is there anything Laurel Hill would say no to?
Every year, Vida, a web site focusing on "women in the literary arts," breaks down the output of several national literary/literary-ish publications — Paris Review, New Yorker, Granta, Harper's — by gender. And every year the results skew male. We're talking writers, authors, book reviewers and more. Dudes all over the place. Emily Guendelsberger took one look at it and said, "I always did wonder why Philip Roth was so acclaimed." Check out Vida's amazing assortment of bar graphs here. Ooh, even better, go here for the extended intro and slideshow.
This weekend, Philadelphia’s most prominent media-centric dynasty (as if we had a bunch) the Robertses of Comcast/Universal/Xfinity fame made their presence known at several top notch events. If I had known, I would have brought my bill.
Editor's Note: Please welcome City Paper food editor Caroline Russock to the world of music criticism. Don't worry, she's only going to be commenting on the potable aspects of shows around Philly.
Okay, so Kung Fu Necktie has a $4 Citywide featuring 16 ounces of Pabst and a generous shot of Heaven Hill. I had a few, they were fine. Review over, right?
Eh, not really. So Mac DeMarco has been a long time coming to Philly and last night's show was pretty much perfect. He was growly and wonderful, equal parts crooner and cool rock and roll with just the right amount of stand-up calibre band banter. "Baby's Wearing Blue Jeans" plus "Rock and Roll Night Club," "Freaking Out the Neighborhood" rounded out with a cover of Metallica's "Enter Sandman" transitioning to a sweet rendition of "Still Together" that lead to a few pretty hilarious KFN pickup attempts. Solid set and afterwards MDM asked the crowd for afterhours Philly suggestions (El Bar, obviously) earning him the title of the most party dude on Captured Tracks.
Yeah The Divine Lorraine is the most exploited and photographed building in Philadelphia (sorry, Independence Hall), but you gotta admit this is a pretty cool shirt by PussyCatTees.
You know those parties that feel totally perfect? The ones where everybody gets to dance to music they love, and it keeps you moving without wearing you out? Where rock and electronica sit side by side without anybody batting an eyelash because something’s too jarring or out of place? Where people keep themselves in check so well that you don’t have to clean up blood or haul buckets of vomit out the window?
Some of the best shows have that effortless atmosphere of fun and intimacy too, like Friday’s Isaac Delusion show at North Star Bar.
Tonight’s show at North Star Bar is a trip through a reverb-drenched sonic forest. The Downtown Club, a Philly-based trio rooted in British post-punk like Gang of Four and Public Image Ltd., will get you moving early on. Metronomic drumlines and gritty picked bass lock in tandem with singer April Harkanson’s vocals, alternating between hushed utterances and anguished belting, sitting on top of the whole mix. Stay for Cruiser, the project of local musician Andy States, and their jangly and timeless take on dream pop. Their latest EP (produced by Jeremy Park, who also produced Youth Lagoon’s The Year of Hibernation) features jangly guitars and States’s baritone moving in and out of melodic soundscapes as beautiful as they are catchy. Paris duo Isaac Delusion closes the night with party-ready synth-driven music combining hip-hop beats with light-footed vocals that’ll have you leave the venue with a smile on your face. Of course, be sure to bring your dancing shoes, as silly as they may look at whatever gallery you’re hitting up right before, because this line-up begs it of you.
Fri., March 1, 9 p.m., $8-$10, North Star Bar, 2639 Poplar St., 215-787-0488, northstarbar.com.
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